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Tod Dockstader (1932, Minnesota), who had been working in Hollywood since 1955 as a cartoonist and film editor, became a self-taught sound engineer and sound-effect specialist in 1958. Within a few years, he used the same machines to produce tapes of musique concrete a` la Pierre Schaeffer such as Eight Electronic Pieces (1960),
later collected on Eight Electronic Pieces (Folkways, 1961 -
Locust, 2004),
including Piece No 8 - Travelling Music (1960), a stereo composition
that pulls sounds from different directions to disorient the listener while
also toying with tonal contrast, and, quite simply, the archetype for sci-fi
soundtracks with its hyperkinetic and disordered volleys of alien electronica.
Luna Park (1961) is instead a rather structured composition built around
electronically-processed laughter, loosely divided in three movements:
an "allegro" created by a lively collage of snippets and echoes of laughter,
an "adagio" that consists in a sinister middle section of abstract turbulence,
and a "scherzo" of shimmering electronic timbres that intones a childish melody.
Drone (1962) is a take on musique concrete and (involuntarily) free jazz,
but perhaps notable mainly for the way it manipulates and mashes the sounds of guitar and piano, as well as for an atmosphere that predates industrial music
by more than a decade.
He managed to release three albums of "organized sound": the electronic
Apocalypse (Owl, 1966), that employed
sine-wave test generators ("oscillators"),
Drone/ Water Music (Owl, 1966),
and the abstract noise concept Quatermass (Owl, 1966 - Starkland, 1993).
Water Music; Quatermass (Starkland, 1992) collects two of these
pieces.
Apocalypse (1961) was the work that best bridged the experiments of
Schaeffer's musique concrete and the new electronic technology.
The beginning is much more austere and poignant than his other pieces of
the era. It aims at creating a cinematic suspense rather than just shocking
the senses. The second movement stages robotic voices and
domestic sounds (one even reminiscent of Pierre Henry's creaking door),
achieving the exact opposite of the first one: demistifying electronic
sounds. The third one, however, regurgitates drones and screams attaining
a bleak requiem-like poignancy.
The nine-minute four movement (almost half of the whole composition) is
a collage of
ghostly whistles, macabre booms, meowing, footsteps, bells and so forth,
a dizzying vortex of sonic images.
The six-movement Water Music (1963) radiates visions of science-fiction
movies. The first movement sounds like fast alien heartbeats welcomed by
cricket sounds and dissolving into gurgling water. The second movement is
a childish scherzo in the vein of Pierre Schaeffer's early musique concrete.
The third movement is alien language again. The fifth is the most abstract
and incoherent. Dockstader chose timbres that were clearly outside the
boundaries of orchestral music: rather than trying to imitate the orchestra,
he set out to invent a completely new aesthetics.
The much more ambitious, five-movement Quatermass (1964) added a
narrative and dramatic emphasis that was missing from the free-form
exploration of Water Music. It begins with booming gongs and
child-like wailing (the nine-minute Song And Lament).
Tango is a mechanic ballet with dub-like reverbs and scratch-like
distortions. Parade harks back to the cacophonous improvisation
of Water Music.
Flight, a variation on the Tango, is an even subtler analysis
and collage of evocative and menacing timbres.
The finale (Second Song) is the deafening, expressionist 14-minute
crescendo of anguish-filled drones that sound like screams.
The sounds for this suite were selected from a "database" of 125 hours
of "interesting" sounds. The main source of such sounds was actually a
balloon (which explains the similarity with the timbres of reed instruments).
His last composition was Four Telemetry Tapes (1965), a chaotic
electronic poem in four brief movements that mostly sounds self-indulgent,
although the third movement is almost punk-rock in its emphatic sonic assault
and the fourth movement predates the ping-pong soundtracks of videogames.
Omniphony I (Owl, 1967 - ReR, 2004) consisted in an electronic
manipulation by Dockstader of an orchestral work composed by James Reichert.
At this point, synthesizers made his tape-based technique obsolete, and
Dockstader couldn't find any music center willing to let him continue his
research (he had not formal degree in music).
Organized Sound vol. 1-2 (Owl, 1982) is an anthology.
The reissue of Apocalypse (Starkland, 2003)
includes Luna Park (1961) for processed laughter,
Traveling Music (1960), Apocalypse (1961),
and Four Telemetry Tapes (1965).
Aerial 1 (Sub Rosa, 2004) is a composition for shortwave radio, first
of a trilogy assembled at the computer in 2001-03.
Dockstader collaborated with
David Lee Meyers of Arcane Device
to create the 27 brief vignettes of
Bijou (ReR, 2005). Standouts include the
bleak, suspense-filled atmosphere of Closer Closer and Encasement,
the elegant musique concrete of City Of Industry and
The Doktor Is In,
the hallucinated void of Abstractions Unchained,
the timbric explorations of Machine Mystique and Battle Finale,
Needless to say, most tracks last one or two minutes, which is too short a time
to construct any meaningful architecture.
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